“Your servants, sir, male and female, are only fit for the gallows,” he said fiercely, “and the sooner they hang the better. Such a varlet as that big ruffian of yours would get the pravezh here!”
“You do not know his good qualities, monsieur,” said my master suavely; “he has been a faithful servant to me. Your misstep was distressing, but it might have had even worse consequences, for the stairs are steep.”
“Yes, it might have broken my neck,” replied the boyar, casting a dark look at his host, “but for that fat beast at the bottom.”
“Exactly,” said Maître le Bastien; “so, after all, she served a good purpose in breaking your excellency’s fall.”
But Kurakin would not be appeased; he had been balked, and he knew it; but we were too many for one, and he took himself off, with such ill-concealed rage and malice that I saw that the goldsmith was uneasy. When he was gone, and I had related the whole incident and began to laugh at it, Maître le Bastien held up his hand.
“He laughs longest who laughs last,” he said gravely. “Have a care, M. le Marquis; these Russians are fiery creatures, and this man has all the fierce pride of his class. ’Tis as I feared; there is some mystery behind that bauble, and, please the saints, I’ll get it out of my house as soon as I may; therefore give it to me, monsieur, and let me secure the miniature and return it to this princess of yours.”
Willing enough to hasten the chance of seeing the beauty again, I gave him the locket with alacrity, and he lost no time in going to work at it. But it proved a more delicate task than he had expected, and it was well on into the evening before it was completed and far too late to return it to the palace of Prince Voronin. So we had an opportunity to discuss the matter again at supper, and the master told me the little he knew of the prince and of the Boyar Kurakin.
“Voronin belongs to the oldest and proudest class of the nobility, and was deeply offended, as they all were, at the Czar Feodor for burning the Books of Precedence,” Le Bastien said, while we were eating a stew of sterlet, the famous fish of the Volga. “All these men were firmly established by these very books; the recorded deeds of their illustrious ancestors and their rank on those singular pages decided their own position in the state. No man would take a lower place than that of his ancestors, and Dr. Von Gaden, the court physician, tells me that many a campaign has been lost because of this fierce scramble for place. When Feodor, therefore, weary of choosing a fool for a servant because his father had been wise, burned these books, he insulted the old aristocracy, and they all hate his memory and his mother’s family, the Miloslavskys, as they hate the devil, and are ready to uphold little Peter and the Naryshkins. It is only those who are identified by interests of some kind with the Miloslavskys—like Prince Galitsyn—who uphold the cause of the Czarevitch Ivan. Kurakin is one of these; he was mixed up in all the intrigues of the late czar’s reign, and he is Miloslavsky to the backbone. Here, then, is the probable key to the situation; the Voronins are Naryshkins, Kurakin and Galitsyn are Miloslavskys, and this trinket has some mysterious importance.”
But quite another thought was clouding my horizon.
“And the Princess Daria,” I said; “is she the wife, or the daughter, of Prince Voronin?”